The Dodgers obtained Tigers ace Tarik Skubal before the trade deadline trying to enhance their chances of three-peating as World Series champions. (Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Major League Baseball and its players’ union are headed for a lockout. And the Tigers trading two-time American League Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal to the Dodgers just a few day before the trade deadline does nothing to change that stark fact.
The question is how long the lockout will last into the 2027 season before one side or the other blinks.
The main issue is a salary cap and floor proposed by the owners. It’s a non-starter for the players. It’s the North Star for the owners. As I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times during the All-Star break, the sides are locked into those positions. Nothing has changed in the weeks since then.
But it’s still early in the negotiations. The current Basic Agreement doesn’t expire until Dec. 1. That’s when the lockout will begin, halting all trades, free-agent signings and offseason business.
The players could strike before then, but they insist that’s not going to happen. If one judges from the pattern the last time this happened during collective bargaining in 2021, the real negotiations didn’t begin until spring training was shut down in 2022.
The two sides reached a deal on March 10, 2022, and the season began a little late that April 7. But none of the 162 games for all 30 clubs were missed. Of course, back then, the salary cap and floor were not on the table.
Rob Manfred And Bruce Meyers Met With Baseball Writers
Bruce Meyer, the new executive director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, and Rob Manfred, in his waning days as baseball commissioner, both elaborated on their positions in separate question and answer sessions with members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. The chats occurred on July 14 in the hours just before the All-Star Game in Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park.
“I have an ownership group that’s more united than any time I’ve been in baseball,” said Manfred, who succeeded Bud Selig in 2015 and expects to retire at the end of his current term in 2029.
“Salary caps are a bad offense,” said Meyers, who replaced Tony Clark this past spring after eight years as the union’s general counsel and lead negotiator. “Salary caps prevent teams from doing the things they believe are in the interest of making the team better.”
Both leaders argue for and against that a cap and floor affects competitive balance in the sport.
The system of a luxury tax threshold and tax was first devised in the labor negotiation of 2002 and were meant to stymie the freewheeling spending of that era’s Yankees, who went to the World Series in 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2003, winning it all four times during that span.
It had its desired impact because the Yankees have been to the World Series twice since then winning in 2009 and losing to the Dodgers in 2024.
But baseball owners then began approving the sale of teams like the Dodgers and Mets to hedge fund owners with deep pockets and that changed the equation. The Dodgers were sold to Guggenheim Baseball and Mark Walter after a 2011 bankruptcy auction. The Dodgers weren’t actually bankrupt at the time, but then owner Frank McCourt used the process to keep MLB from seizing the team.
The luxury tax was collectively bargained with a tax utilized to constrain owners from overspending the annual threshold. When owners don’t care about paying the tax, it ceases to be a constraint.
The Dodgers Have The Top Payroll in MLB
Post deadline, the Dodgers have a player payroll for luxury tax purposes of $431.5 million and are projected to pay a tax penalty of $187.5 million, tops in the MLB in both categories, according to figures provided by Spotrac. The threshold is $244 million. Their tax penalty is actually higher than the total player payrolls of the bottom 13 teams.
The Dodgers winning and the fact they’re trying to three-peat for the first time since the 1998 to 2000 Yankees, is certainly an argument for a salary cap. But their baseball operations is obviously good at what it does.
The Mets under multi-billionaire Steve Cohen are the other side of the coin. The Mets have a player payroll for luxury tax purposes of $363.4 million and a tax bill of $119.5 million, both No. 2 in baseball. They have nothing to show for it and have the second worst record in the National League.
Ten teams in the lower half of baseball’s payroll list are playoff competitive right now with about 50 games to go in the season, including the White Sox at $125.2 million, the Rays at $112.4 million and Cleveland at $89 million.
That feeds the union’s argument that competitive balance is just fine without a cap.
But Manfred has this talking point: “It’s not a fair fight.”
“If you have a high payroll, you’re much more likely to make the playoffs,” he said in Philadelphia. “And if you have a high payroll, your chances of going to each of the successive rounds are massively higher than a low payroll club.”
An example of that is last year’s Brewers, who had the best regular season record in MLB with a 22nd in the league $143.6 million payroll, but were swept in the National League Championship Series by the top spending Dodgers at $417.3 million. The Brewers again are virtually tied with the Dodgers for MLB’s best record while spending a 19th in MLB $150.4 million.
The data, Manfred says, already dictates the results of this postseason.
The Dodgers, as it turns out, are feeding the rest of the lower quadrant MLB teams. The Dodgers kicked in about $175 million last year to revenue sharing in addition to their $169.4 million luxury tax, a total of $344.4 million, it was pointed out by Sportico on Tuesday.
That was based on $1.1 billion in local revenue and an attendance of 4 million at 50,000-seat Dodger Stadium, the biggest ballpark in the league. Both figures are projected to be comparable this season.
That’s why the Dodgers were in the market for Skubal, although Tigers general manager Scott Harris said his club had other proposals. They chose the Dodgers because it was the best one. It’s also where Skubal wanted to go. Other starting pitching dominos fell around the league after that.
“Every team could trade for me,” Skubal told reporters Monday night. “I don’t sympathize with people that blame the Dodgers for anything they’ve done. I really don’t sympathize with people [who] are complaining because the Dodgers do all the right things.”
Skubal is a short-term rental. He’s a free agent after the season. The Dodgers barely won the World Series last year without him. There are no guarantees now.